So, after a year of magisterial thumb-sucking the U.S. Supreme Court issued it's ruling that confirms, in the same sense that your eyes "confirm" seeing a barn in broad daylight, that, no, the executive branch cannot - simply by calling some random things an "emergency" - grift the power of the purse explicitly assigned to the legislative branch by the foundational documents of the republic.
Tl:dr; fuck you, Fatso, your "big beautiful tariffs" are illegal.
I'll get back to this in a bit, but the most annoying-to-the-point-of-infuriating part of this is the whole "No, duh?" part.
Everyone with a functioning hindbrain knew this the moment the felonious fucker came storming off his gilded toilet to announce that We the People were going to do a big ol' round of McKinleynomics. I wrote a whole post about this idiocy back in
April 2025 when the nitwit spammed everything with his first round of them, and then revisited the subject with my own Tariff Tale
in November.
(Oh, and at this point I should throw in the most recent chapter of my personal encounter with Dumbfuck Don's Tariff Turgidity, in which I received a reply to my disputation of duties in January, 2026. UPS sent me the following:
"I am the Post-Entry Researcher assigned to the attached dispute. Your shipment has been flagged for aluminum duties, and U.S. Customs requires the attached Section 232 form to be completed. If the items do not contain aluminum, please enter the commodity name in the description field and indicate “N/A” in all remaining fields."
Okay, now; keep this in mind. The time and expense of all of this nonsense, from the billing for, and initial payment of, the duties on the object (a replica sword manufactured in Japan), the additional 200% tariff demand, my dispute of the additional demand, and now UPS' dispute of my dispute, were being borne by U.S. citizens. Neither a nanosecond nor a penny of this stupidity was coming from Tozando, the Japanese retailer.
Per UPS the duties on aluminum imposed by the administration's both then- and now-clearly-illegal fuckery were, indeed, 200%. Which sent me back to the calculator and, after that, the laptop keyboard, to compose the following reply:
"Here's the Section 232 Form with the information from this item, based on the following:
The item is a replica sword.
The aluminum is contained only in the blade.
The weight of the blade is approximately 5kg
The amount of aluminum in the blade is 13.5% per the manufacturer's declaration.
Based on this the approximate weight of aluminum is approximately 0.675kg.
The price of aluminum in Japan is listed as $86/ton for Q4 2025.
Therefor the value of the aluminum in this item is ($86/907.185)*0.675, or about $0.14."
At which point I came damn near to dropping three dimes in an envelope and mailing them to the Post-Entry Researcher's address in San Diego. I resisted, but, fuck, it was a damn near-run thing.
I'm debating whether to now go ahead, or turn around and demand my initial $54 back from Felony Fats' crew of gormless idiots).
Here's the larger, and more infuriating, point of my ranting about this. It's just one more goddamn thing that this crew of acephalic numbskulls does every fucking day. And...
What's
The
Fucking
Value
Of
ANY
Of
This
Trumpy
Bullshit?
To any of us not 1) in the two-yacht income brackets, or 2) utterly baked in gibbering racist, sexist, xenophobic, Christopathic lunacy to the point where "fucking with
those people" is "in my best interests" (i.e. nuttier than a Snickers bar).
I mean, pick one. Any one. Of the fucking things these treasonous Nazi fucks have wrangled up over the past year and change, like these ridiculous (and now officially illegal) tariffs.
Deporting everything and everyone in sight? Drywallers, bean and pear pickers? Bodega grannies? School kids? (Oh, and ass-beating and murdering random passersby in the process)?
Sluicing tax cuts to fatcats?
Pimping coal mining?
Deregulating everything in sight so the fatcats and coal miners and all the other GOP remoras get to wet their fucking beaks while the world overheats and the clean air and water disappear?
Trashing things like the vaccinations and the medical care and research and disease control that made 20th Century medical care the safest and healthiest in human history (for those who could afford it, anyway...)?
Doing bizarre, random, vicious and/or stupid acts of violence all over the place, from South and Central America to the Middle East as they destroy the post-1945 Western alliance systems?
And that's just the legal stuff. We haven't even turned towards the grotesquely Trumpy corruption that makes Warren Harding's crew look like rank amateurs and the policeman in Arrijan green with envy.
At least the OG Nazis had World War 1 and Versailles and occupation and hyperinflation and depression to blame. And actual, no-shit Commie Reds right next door.
Doesn't excuse the murderous fuckers, mind. But you can see how Joachim and Marta Mittagessenkasten could see voting for the sonsofbitches.
What's our excuse?
That transsexual illegal Haitian porch pirates are cooking up Labrador au gratin?
Give me a fucking break.
That, as I've repeated over and over, is the truly infuriating piece of all this Trumpfuckery.
It's more than the destruction. It's more than all the toxic "isms" aimed at people just trying to live a life; poor people, brown people, immigrant people, non-binary people, gay and lesbian people, liberal people, urban people. It's more than the vile, repugnant, evil shit that these fucksticks love and plan and do every fucking day.
It's the obvious pointlessness for everyone - liberal or MAGAt - who's not living off daddy's trust fund or some sort of credit-default swap scam or who isn't, as noted above, so mentally baked as to be functionally an intellectual house plant.
None of this shit "makes America great".
If the average Republican wasn't in a Trump cult the GOP would have been tossed in the trash bin of history after 2008 the way they were for the two decades after their post-1929 plutocratic fellatio made it clear whose trouser snake they were Hoovering.
(I see what I did there)
Here's the problem for the rest of us, though.
The mention of 2008 dredges up the ugly reality that, much as the non-insane factions of political power are an order of magnitude better than the MAGAtraitors, they're not that great for the rest of us.
It was as plain as a dog in the daylight that the wealthy, the financial rentier class, the finance bros and banksters, the government "regulators" and fiscal manipulators that were and are in their pockets, are largely in control of the government's hand on the economy. Fiscal policy. Tax policy. Employment and education and almost every other aspect of life in the United States is grotesquely tilted in the direction of the "rich, the well-born, and the able".
It's not "conspiracy theory" for those of us not born with a trust fund to suspect that even if every MAGAt was raptured tomorrow the chances of us and ours getting a better deal for medicine, for college, for solid, reliable, good, rewarding work followed by an honorable and comfortable retirement are...not exceptionally high.
Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has an excellent explanation of the problems with the notion that "we" just need to "take the country back from the MAGAts" by voting out Republicans and then joy and happiness will reign:
"The approach required by this profounder corruption (the "financialization" or elite capture of the economic as a whole, of the sort that 2008 was a symptom, not a cause) is not recovery: returning to where we were means going back to a state of affairs that was manifestly unsustainable. To borrow from the architect of the Democratic Party’s most enduring platform, any recovery that simply restores things as they were will see us all right back where we are now before too much time has passed. Franklin Roosevelt argued in 1934 that the nation needed not merely recovery but “reform and reconstruction . . . much of our trouble today and in the past few years has been due to a lack of understanding of the elementary principles of justice and fairness by those in whom leadership and business and finance and public affairs was placed.” Reconstruction—Roosevelt was well aware of the word’s legacy after the Civil War—meant that leadership, and the conditions that kept them in place, “had to be corrected.”
My only quibble is that it needed more ropes and lampposts, just as 2008 should have, but you take what you can. What we need, though, is a thorough cleansing of the Augean stable of corrupt elite wealth and privilege that has metastasized in the American system. A complete revision of the post-Reagan tax-cut-and-deregulation schemes that have returned the nation, economically and socially and politically, to 1929 if not 1899.
The failure of the First Reconstruction must be reversed, and the success of the Revolt of the Rich and the Rise of the Second Confederacy that has taken place over the past forty-six years, must be destroyed.
Can the United States post-2025 do that?
I'm not sure.
But, goddamn it, we have got to fight for it.
Because the alternative is to be ruled by these idiots.
